Oxford Conference

Guest Blogger, Allen!

Hey friends and family.  Last week I got to go to a conference in Oxford. Oxford is pretty awesome for those of you who haven't been there before. Here are a few highlights, although I am not really the best photographer...

This was the guest house where I stayed. My windows are open on the top floor on the right....

The Pitt Rivers is a super cool Anthropology Museum with literally TONS of stuff in a really small space - really fun to explore.  And they had a cool musical instrument collection!

The view of Christ Church college from across the lawn by a river.  A lovely place for a walk and I really got lucky with the weather!

Last but not least, at the Gala Dinner there was a Theremin Recital!!!!  Link to Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTcic8s9Cck

For those who don't know what a Theremin is, it is an electronic musical instrument that allows you to control the sound by manipulating an electro-magnetic field. You don't have to touch anything! that said, you still have to have very precise movements and it takes a lot of skill and practice.  Apologies that the video is a bit shaky for the first 30 seconds while I was getting settled with my phone - and the volume is really low so you need to turn up your speakers.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTcic8s9Cck

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On the move again: Vermont, Graduations, and Old Friends

Because we keep things "interesting" around here, Allen and I have been pretty busy during the first few weeks of our summer vacation.

First we went to visit our very good friends in Vermont...

Little slice of heaven

It was so much fun to catch up with Aimee and Bill, who we hadn't seen in three years (too long!)... A lot had changed for them since we last saw them, including the addition of 18-month old Dara

Ready to play with mom and dad

I could blast you with pictures of all the fun we had (going hiking, making meals, playing at the museum, putting shoes on our feet, reading stories, etc), but I'll spare you since blogger is not letting me upload the video I wanted to    :(    so, I'll leave you with this instead

Story with smiles time!

Next it was off to Sacred Heart University in Connecticut to see my brother, Darek, graduate with his doctorate in Physical Therapy

Proud family with the happy graduate

Darek is amazing! I'm so proud of him; we're all so proud of him! He's embarking on a new adventure (passing the boards and finding his first job as a licensed PT), but we all have no doubt that he's going to continue kicking butt along the way!

Another graduation that's worth briefly mentioning is Barnard's, my alma mater,  where President Obama gave the commencement address.

“We are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life, whether it’s the salary you earn or the health decisions you make,” President Obama, May 2012

And to round out the busy and amazing week, we headed over the New York city to hang out with our friends Hamsa and Danika, who are shortly headed to the University of Kansas soon. We started off the evening playing Just Dance 3 for the XBOX. This is the most fun party-game/workout EVER!

Feel the burn!

And then of course, it wouldn't have been an evening with H & D without about a million rounds of bridge and drinking fuddy-duddy drinks (this time it was Old Fashioneds)

I was sad to say goodbye for a number of reasons. I left Allen in NYC for the rest of the week, where he's at a musical instrument conference hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also, since I'm headed to CA tomorrow and he's headed to London this weekend, it was our last time to hang out before we're literally on opposite sides of the world for 2 months.  :(

But I've got a lot of great memories to sustain me and we both have a ton of exciting adventures to look forward to!

2012: Best Birthday Ever?*

What a crazy and amazing birthday week** I've been having! I don't even know where to begin. I guess the best place to start is the beginning.

The week began with a networking fair an expoSItion, a student showcase of their various projects. Claire and I presented the A2 Datadive in the hopes of convincing incoming prospective student to sign up. I'm happy to report that I think I was able to convince at least 2 students to sign up just to help out at the datadive.

Partners in crime

The expoSItion was also great opportunity for us to show off to employers as well. I got two interview for summer internships because of my presentation on the A2 Datadive; fingers crossed, I should know in the next week or so what I'll be up to this summer.

So, needless to say this week go started off to a bang, so I was really looking forward to my plans for Friday (my actual birthday). I was going to hang out with friends in the afternoon, go to a student-org sponsored happy hour, and then top the night off by going to see "The Hunger Games" with Allen and a few friends....

Boy, was I wrong.

In what will probably be family-lore for a long time Allen was able to *again* keep a multi-month secret planning a spectacular surprise party for my birthday. I love Allen, but he's terrible at keeping secrets, mostly because he's so darn excited about how sneaky he's being. But he pulled it off again and it was awes-amazing***

Instead of going to a theater we drove to (seemingly) the middle of nowhere and came to this random looking office park with a building that said "Whirlyball" on it ... which before Friday had absolutely no meaning to me.

Neville and I rocking Iron Man mask, for reasons

Whirlyball, which seems to be a truly mid-Western experience, is a cross between bumper cars, lacrosse, and basketball (use your imagination folks)

Putting my game face on

Driving your bumper car, you use that little net I'm holding to toss a whiffle ball into the net, which is built into a basketball goal. Yeah - it was just as awesome as you are imagining right now. Mind you, these bumper cars had no brakes or steering wheel; you basically had no idea what direction you were about to head at any given time. We were laughing hysterically, shouting curses and encouragement, and generally just having a great time. Probably the funniest part though was how serious people got driving their little bumper cars like mini tanks.

Then we got home for dinner and I found that the apartment had been decorated in an Avengers/memes/internet theme (Allen, Neville, and Gina couldn't really decide).

The picture on my cake was really the icing on the ... erm ... cake

We must have ALL OF THE MEMES at this party!

But honestly, the most amazing (and touching) part about this birthday was how many friends came out for my party. Allen said that he had to comb through Facebook to find everyone in a stealthy way -- but I was still really blown away by how many people were in on the planning (my friends who hung out with me that afternoon, the officers of the student org who planned the happy hour to keep me out, and my crazy friends who pretended to be spies on a secret operation to decorate the apartment).

I feel so blessed to have so many amazing people in my life. Thank you guys for helping me cap off a birthday I will never ever forget!

Oh! And I finally got to see the Hunger Games last night - and totally loved it!

______________________________

* I leave this as an open question because it's pretty tough to beat my 25th birthday back in 2008 when Allen surprised me by whisking me down to the Dominican Republic for an vacation where he proposed to me. He got me good then just as he got me good this year.

** I don't believe that the awesomeness of a birthday should be limited to one day

*** Awes-amazing, is totally a (SI) thing

Not all work...

Yesterday I went to a friend's 30th birthday party - the twist was it was at a rollerskating rink. It brings me back to elementary school when rollerskating parties were all the rage! It was ... the coolest thing EVER. And I gotta say after this party and Bill's a couple year's back I gotta say rollerskating parties are still pretty awesome. Friends! You've all been put on notice - next year's the big 3 O for me and I might just have a rollerskating party....

A2 Datadive Recap: Over 70 participants and 2 non-profits helped!

Welcome to the very long overdue recap of the A2 Datadive that I helped host from February 10th - 12th. We had 78 people attend our event that weekend and a lot of amazing work was done for the two non-profits that kindly shared their data with us.

To refresh your memory, a datadive is an opportunity for local non-profits with data they aren't sure what to do with to meet up with data scientists who are willing to provide assistance. The concept was developed by Jake Porway at Data Without Borders, who lamented the fact that non-profits didn't always have the resources to take full advantage of the data they were collecting. Datadives are intended to give these organizations access to folks with the skills to get them started on taking their data to the next level.

This year we had two non-profit participants: Focus: HOPE, a group that is working to improve the quality of life their neighborhood in Detroit and the African Health OER Network (AHON), which is collaboration between medical colleges in the United States and Africa that is providing open educational resources to under-resourced medical colleges in Africa. Each group came with their own set of unique data problems and questions. Focus: HOPE was interested in learning more about the community that they serve (which areas of their neighborhood are taking advantage of their programs? what are the demographics of their community like? can we identify under represented populations in our target area?). AHON wanted to know about the resources they distributed (who was taking advantage of them? which resources or mediums were most used?) and the network that provided those resources (who in the network contributed the most content? could we identify influential members in the network? could we identify members that were not as engaged as other members?)

The plan for the weekend was simple. On Friday evening, the non-profits we had recruited presented their data and questions to the group and there was time for all the participants to socialize before the big work day. Work on Saturday started early, with the data scientist participants digging through the data and coming up with methods to begin answering some of the non-profits' questions. Sunday was reserved for wrapping up the work that was done, documenting the process, and reporting to the non-profits on what we uncovered. Simple, right?

We lost no time getting started on Saturday morning. Above are the two teams strategizing what they intend to work on and how they will plan out their work for the day.

We took over North Quad on the University of Michigan's Central Campus for the weekend. Thankfully there was a lot of space for all of the break out groups to work.

Several Ann Arbor community members came up to me during the event to thank me for hosting an event like this; they were so excited to help in such a unique way. Data Without Borders really tapped into a deep unvoiced need amongst data scientists to be able to contribute their skills for the greater good. It was inspiring to be around so many folks who were so enthusiastic about lending their talents to help institutions in need.

Having fun working with data

Sunday's wrap up was a great chance for us all to see what everyone else had been working on. Above is the work from one of the AHON groups looking at the influence of various members within the organization's network. Preparing for the presentations also gave groups the opportunity to clean up their documentation on the Data Without Borders wiki. As you can see below, several groups tried to create step-by-step instructions so that the non-profits could replicate the work that was done after the datadive was over. Here's a link to the wiki page, in case your interested in the details of what work was done.

But none of this would have been possible without the enormous efforts of my team mates and the student volunteers we had on hand during the event. And of course I can't forget organizations like, Data Driven Detroit and Code for America, who lent their support and know-how to our event as well. Sometimes I'm really staggered when I think about the fact that we basically planned this whole event in less than 3 months... while still being full-time grad students.... HA!

Thanks again for all your help guys!

The Dream Team: Nikki Roda, Emily Puckett Rodgers, and Claire Barco

Emily, Claire, and I are already getting started on planning the event for next year. Fingers crossed, we'll have this event tucked into one of the student organizations on campus. By doing so we hope to keep the institutional memory so that SI and Open.Michigan will keep on datadiving even after Claire and I graduate.

Our big brother organization, Data Without Borders, has shown us so much support and been so encouraging during this whole process that I have no doubts we'll be able to muster up enough energy to hold this event again next year.

Coming soon! More information about the A2 Datadive

So we had an amazing (and exhausting) weekend at the first ever A2 Datadive! I promise to write more about what happened and upload pictures of what the event was like ... but right now it is full crunch time on midterms.

Amazing news is that we made the paper! Michigan Daily wrote a piece about our event, and even misspelled my name twice! ;)

On a more serious note, I've still got a lot to take in from the event, but one thing that really struck me was home many community members attended and also personally thanked me for thinking of such a creative use for their skills. I'm definitely not taking credit for the idea, which belongs firmly to Data Without Borders, but clearly this idea has tapped into a really deep and unknown/unvoiced need from this community (data scientists). It seems that they were just thankful to have been able to put their skills to good use... to get a chance to volunteer and give back, but in such a way that also provided a lot of mental stimulation. I was really blown away by the enthusiasm of this group.

The whole event was really inspiring.... but more on that later.

Now back to the grind

A2 Datadive starts this weekend!

It is finally coming together, folks! What started as an idea this summer has rolled into an event that we'll be hosting at my school THIS weekend!

I know you'll all be with me this weekend in spirit - but in case your interested, you can follow along with the work being done this weekend by checking out the project pages we've set up on the Data Without Borders wiki. As work gets done, we'll be documenting the process on the wiki so that the non-profits have a record of all the work that was done (and hopefully some instructions on how to replicate it).

Here is the link for the African Health OER Network project page.

And here's the link for Focus: HOPE's project page. You can see I've already added a lot of documentation to Focus: HOPE's page because their data needed a lot more scrubbing and prep work ahead of the datadive.

We apparently have 70 people registered for the event already - which is incredible! I feel so thankful that I go to a school where there is such a positive environment for giving back to the community. Anyone's guess as to how many people ACTUALLY show up - especially since we weren't expecting people to stay all day ... but still! This is pretty awesome!

Regardless of the turn out, I've planted a couple of ringers into the group, so I'm confident that we'll have some good output for the non-profits by the end of the weekend.

Keep your fingers crossed for me this weekend! This is probably the biggest (and most uncertain) event I've ever put together. I'll be sure to keep you posted as to how it went!

A thoroughly geeky evening

After a seemingly interminable first week of classes we thought we'd take Saturday off to geek out!

Here's Allen playing with his Christmas present, an Electronic Drum Machine Shirt from ThinkGeek. He was having such a blast with it because it comes with a little mini amp that goes to 11, allows you to loop tracks, and has an output so you can record the beats you've made with a shirt! Dissertation productivity might have seriously gone down yesterday, but fun definitely went up!

We also invited a group of friends over to watch Star Wars Uncut, which is a remaking of of the original... just by fans ... and in 15 second increments. Sadly the video feed didn't work so we weren't able to see it to the end ... but no matter we had plenty of bad movies on hand (ahem, DareDevil) to make fun of and the interent provided a ridiculous amount of funny videos to entertain us. Some of my favorites included Guy on a Buffalo and Dara O'Brian on videogames... in my defense though, I was pretty tired! ;)

Hamsa and Danika Get Hitched!

Buttermilk Falls in Ithaca

So last weekend we drove out to Ithaca with all the junk I was planning to move to Michigan (more on that later) for the wedding of our friends Hamsa and Danika .... names more diligent readers will recognize as our card-playing-gin-drinking buddies from Delhi.

Ithaca really is GORGES (ahahaha) ... and we didn't wanted to miss out on all the fun wedding activities that were happening throughout the week so we set up camp at Treman State Park.


We love love love this tent that the Metzner's gave us (sniff, sniff) for our wedding two years ago. It held up in some serious rain and cold over our days camping in the park.

We were graciously invited to some of the pre-wedding bachelorette/bachelor day activities. The ladies had a bridal shower, a trip to Treman State Park swimming hole, group nap-yoga (seriously), dinner and dancing.




The boys spent the day playing paintball and Beersbee then later met us out for dancing. They were a little worse for wear (they all - including the groom - had some really angry looking red bruises), but seemed to have had a lot of fun.




Their ceremony was beautiful ...


And the reception was a blast!

Despite the threat from Irene the weather held out for Hamsa and Danika...


... although by the Sunday morning rain was coming down in buckets in Ithaca. I know of several people who's travel plans were disrupted by the storm. Thankfully Allen made it back to Brooklyn safely. Our building wasn't affected by the storm at all (no flooding, no loss of power).

I on the other hand headed straight to Ann Arbor from the wedding. After an 8 1/2 hour drive I made it to my new home ... but more on that in a bit.

A New Do!

So I took the plunge shortly after getting back and chopped off all my hair. Two years of growth (nearly down to my butt) was getting to be a little heavy and annoying for my taste.



I measured these "beasts" dry and they were nearly a half a pound (imagine how heavy they must have been wet!).

Its so good to see my curls again ... instead of having them tied down in a braid all the time.

Odd culture shock

I'm back in the States! I left India super early Monday morning; got in to NJ around noon; had two days with the folks and some errand running in NYC; and now I'm happily in Ann Arbor, MI looking for housing for next school year.

I'm very happy to be back. It was great seeing my family (even if only for a little while - I'll be back soon!). And visiting my home away from home - NYC - was a real treat.

But I've been giggling for the last couple of days about my "culture shock". Honestly, I haven't felt frustrated in the way I was expecting (maybe that will come later?) ... but rather, I'm getting a little thrown off by small differences.

The silliest, by far, is that America's light switches are "backwards" for me now.

In India, to turn a switch on, you press the bottom half of the switch; sometimes, the top part which will now be sticking out from the wall even has a red light on top that lets you know the power is now on.

In the States, it is the opposite.

So, embarrassingly, a couple of times I've walked into a room in my parents house and wasn't exactly sure how to turn on the lights because the way they were already positioned said "off" to my brain.

LOL!

I guess I should be pretty thankful that this is, seemingly, the worst of my culture shock so far!

Cheating-Wheating Sari Tying

So as I was getting ready to come back to the United States, I realized that I would be lost if I tried to tie any of my beautiful saris by myself. I'm man enough to admit it, I'm a lost cause when it comes to sari-tying.

So, I'm going to let you in on my new cheating-wheating sari tying secret: get them pre-tied.

What does that mean? Well, I tell you.

You go to a skillful tailor who will make a skirt out of the 9 yards of fabric, pleats and all… with some extra fabric left over for your stylish pullu. That way any idiot can put it together (like me!)

Start with wrapping the skirt...


... with some buttons and hooks in place to hold up the folds (also they provide a little extra wiggle room in case you eat too much at the wedding you're at)

With the skirt in place (and no threat of falling apart!), now all you have to do is wrap a stylish pullu



… and no one is the wiser!
I had mine made by Mrs. Amarjit Bahl - a fabulous tailor (and wonderful lady) based in Defense Colony in Delhi.

I'll add her contact details at the end of this post for anyone else adventuresome enough to liberate themselves from troublesome sari tying!

Studio Pride
Mrs. Amarjit Bahl
C-93 Defense Colony, New Delhi 110024
Moble: 9810625205; 9810235062
email: pride-impex@eth.net